One thing to note that people looking up items was mostly phone. That is probably indicative of people seeing if the brick and mortar price is *really* a good deal or they would just as soon get the item online. I suspect most cell phone browsing is done in store (which would indicate a desire to better research the purchase in front of them) and probably same for purchases (brick and mortar highlighted awareness, and shopper bought from the cheaper source (this is why someone would get something online instead of 'where they are').

They also apply the term 'mobile' in a disingeneous way. They refer to both cell phones (which people tend to only resort to when truly on the move) and tablets (which generally are used in the same situations as the users would have used laptops otherwise). I personally would be using a laptop for any browsing activity (web navigation I find easier with conventional interfaces and tablet I tend to use only for reading and video ever so often), but a lot of people use tablets for almost all their computing activities nowadays. Some people draw the line at laptop v tablet for things that require complex cursor manipulation and/or text entry, but online shopping is generally neither of those things.

You mean that data that is stamped onto a plastic card in the clear in the wallet that is probably right next to said cell phone if someone robs you? The little card that people hand over freely to low paid waitstaff at a restaurant who might disappear for 5-6 minutes with your card out of sight? The card that is inserted into dozens of public card readers that might have a skimmer on them over the course of a week? Face it, the entire state of CC numbers is insanity from a security perspective (a single 'secret' that must be shared with everyone who you want to pay that is as able to authenticate the transaction you provided it for as it is able to authenticate any transaction to anyone.).

Maybe you mean to say a phone is a prime target for phishing and/or malware, but I would fail to see how that situation would differ from a run of the mill desktop pc.

Combine this with some reports that in-store shopping was down (even if including the days prior) and it may suggest that more people are moving to shopping online than in-store, not that revenue overall is up.

As a very well known xkcd points out, a great deal of the problem could be averted if people weer encouraged to use long passphrases with spaces and everything rather than a pass'word'. password as a concept was good enough for the time of it's popularity, to defend against people typing their way into someone else's account. When the model fell apart in a world with much more automation and network connectivity, the 'fix' was 'keep length about the same, but toss some numbers and maybe some punctuation in there'.

The madness comes in when a great deal of the sites I visit put a 12 character *maximum* on a password for their site.

My personal strategy: base64.b64encode(os.urandom(12)) for every site and store the values on a couple of my devices with a phrase that is about 32 characters long (but easy for me to remember and easy to type). hashing a master key with the domain to generate passwords like some chrome and firefox plugins (password hasher) can do is similarly nice without having to worry that you won't have access to the copy of the database.. Of course, the annoying thing is my 16 random numbers and letters frequently fail the 'complexity' check and I have to add some punctuation character to it.

Delivery trucks are massive beasts forced to take circuitous routes to accomplish their purpose.

These devices do indeed have the burden of being airborne, but on the other hand are much lighter weight (e.g. don't need a lot of safety features, don't have to size capacity to a max load' which might not be as close to average load, and can go direct without worrying about whether there are roads or not).

I think there are other logistical challenges that have me skeptical, but I could be convinced that overall the energy picture might not be too bad.

I assume you meant 30 miles (and the record is currently just shy of 35 miles), 3 miles would be rather sad. That is 30 miles being in the ballpark of record setting RC FPV without payload.

Amazon is suggesting a 10 mile range for their design currently.

now to take the amazon of today and make a technology with a 10 mile range anything more than a 'gee-whiz' factor for urban areas would require a pretty dramatic change. When people think warehouse-level stock with insane coverage, they think 'wal-mart'. The nearest walmart to my parents house is 18 miles as the crow flies. One source claimed the average distance to a wal-mart from average house in US was 30 miles (which I think is a bit far but couldn't find quality data in short notice). Amazon would need a real-estate footprint on the order of 9 times as much as wal-mart to cover the market. Even assuming Amazon only has ambitions to service urban areas, they are still looking at a footprint roughly on the order of wal-mart. Amazon has been eating into brick and mortar in no small part due to having so low a footprint, not having to stock everything everywhere, and so on and so fourth. If Amazon gets some regulatory precedents set for this to happen, Wal-Mart can swoop in and implement it in pretty short order.

We post specific 'requirements' fully aware that no applicant will meet every single one (well, it happened once when someone applied for a position after having left our group a few months prior). For us, it's more about describing what the job will entail and attracting people who wouldn't mind working with the stated technologies.

We had once upon a time not bothered listing the technologies we already knew a candidate would not have experience with, but we were inundated with applicants that made clear they were unable/unwilling to work with things they were not already familiar with.

Now we list things knowing full well applicants won't have experience, but we still get applicants and almost always they might be a bit concerned they lack the 'requirements' but they always had the will to entertain learning new things and usually seemed to have the ability to actually become proficient.

I of course have seen the more common thing, some 'public' job offer that was tailor made for a specific guy, but I know first hand some of these things are crafted with total awareness the requirements are not going to be met.

I conceded that it is justified to worry about how freely QE is being used, but it must also be recognized that the most vocal knee-jerk counter-proposals (give up on fiat currency for some fixed resource X) have actively displayed very damaging behaviors even as people advocate for them.

QE in this case is probably most problematic since it has, in practice, been like 'trickle down', causing the high end indicators (like stocks) to return to the highs before the recession, whilst leaving unemployment too high. I suppose the theory is that while 'trickle down' has been proven not to work because the 'haves' don't have incentive to give, but when they don't feel wealthy they will robb the 'have-nots' like bandits...

The German period is of course the period following World War I. They were in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario where the winners basically put things into motion that were going to destroy what was left of the German economy no matter how you sliced it, and they ended up inflicting hyper-inflation upon themselves by trying to 'print' their way out of it. This is generally how hyper inflation works, the authoritative body starts printing them like toilet paper usually out of response to some very dire circumstance.

This is of course what people rightly worry about in the context of Quantitative easing (how much is too little or too much is something that is just a guess until it's too late). Of course we have examples of what the opposite (hyper deflation) can do to an economy and it is equally devastating so we can't say 'printing money' done carefully is unequivocably bad. Anyone looking at bitcoin value over time can see that it has been hyper deflationary and if it were central to a 'real' economy, that economy would be in trouble.

What mechanism would that be? Do you refer to the notion that because it is not a fiat currency that it must be better? There's also a fixed quantity of helium in the world, why not use that as currency? That means gold must have tracked the average cost of things pretty closely... no wait, it hasn't. Well at least gold has always gone up lately so it's predictable in the deflationary effect, well except the rather sharp decline since the beginning of 2012. Or do you think that because it has the potential for anonymity roughly equivalent to cash that it has value? The two problems there are that, in practice, people would rather have a very clear claim to ownership than anonymity, and the transactions are actually more traceable than most cash transactions.

I hate to break it to you, but that's true of *EVERY* currency that has ever existed, bitcoin included. Ever since growing beyond the feasibility of straight barter systems, our economies have relied on consensus agreement upon an arbitrary assignment of value to some 'thing', whether it be gold, silver, bitcoin or some made up but explicitly managed thing backed by a stable organization like most modern currencies in the developed world.. If walmart started accepting bitcoins exclusively, then bitcoins 'value' would increase, that's precisely because 'everyone else is doing' is the *singular* important thing in any 'currency'. If 90% of the people willing to accept bitcoin as 'payment' lost their faith, it would crash (and in fact enter a death spiral landing in zero).

That is of course a very very likely thing. I think the first world nations are where they are because they strike the right balance. Not *too* few people in a position to completely change things, but not so many that it devolves to chaos.

Even with the relatively still small subset of the population that is participating in it, they have made BitCoin untenable as a currency. It's simply too volatile. Over the last few hours, the 'value' has increased by 20%. Now that *sounds* to BitCoin advocates like awesome news, but it means I can't negotiate an annual salary or a reasonably establish terms for a loan or really much of any sort of long term planning.

While people may rail against a central bank manipulating a currency, the aggregate behavior of any fixed currency without some regulatory hand has been too volatile for day to day use. People complain that the QE is going to, bound to lead to hyperinflation, but thus far that has not happened but we have seen hyper-deflation in terms of BitCoin overall and a lot of extreme booms and busts along the way. People are right to worry about QE going to far, but jumping on the gold or bitcoin bandwagon is betting on systems that have objectively demonstrated in practice worse behaviors than what has been observed in the central banks.

Windows Phone OS had been released in the hopes of getting to rough parity in the market with Android and Apple. MS had to start from scratch due to both form factor driving UI redesign and also because no x86 vendor was remotely ready to enable such a thing. After having a late start and nothing really to distinguish themselves from apple and google apart from having a smaller application library, things look dire.

The whole point of Metro was essentially to 'throw the desktop users under the bus' so to speak. MS had learned already (Vista) that MS laptop/desktop customers are very much *stuck* with them and the risk of dramatic change to their share is negligible. So they needed to try to move developers to a model that would get them closer to the windows phone platform, hence metro.

Of course the RT situation was always questionable. An x86 based solution could do a strict superset of the RT based devices, and AMD at least was desperate enough to give the right pricing (and Intel felt the pressure enough to deliver viable solutions in time as well). WIndows value proposition is the ability to run existing x86 Windows applications. Without that, there is nothing really to recommend it over other platforms.

RT couldn't find a value proposition that created a market just like windows phone is struggling. Windows without legacy compatibility is just not attractive (live by the sword, die by the sword: windows on x86 has gobs of compatible software, windows on arm has next to nothing compared to google and apple devices).

The initial hard *need* for RT would be that Intel couldn't/wouldn't release an architecture that would even get in the same ballpark as ARM manufacturers in terms of cost and power. Now that need is greatly reduced with Intel's Bay Trail platform. Windows 8 x86 tablets are in the same ballpark as the Nexus 7. There are certainly cheaper android devices more and more, but Intel and MS could elect to participate at those price points if they want to at this point and still turn a profit.

You have that for any *currency*, fiat or not. Let's take a hypothetical and say you went through the last decade or so living as if gold *was* the standard and valued everything in ounces. You would have suffered the effects of pretty strong deflation going to the end of 2011. In the time since the end of 2011, you would have had pretty bad inflation. Confidence in gold is highly volatile and it's impossible to make good long term guesses. You could argue there are other precious metals and the aggregate of them would appear stable, but the point is the poster child of a non-fiat currency is gold, and that's why gold's value has fluctuated so much more than things on average. Putting aside the value of 'confidence' in gold as something more than 'just a chunk of metal', and gold would be much much much cheaper since it's practical applications are notable, but no where near justifying the market price.

The problem is that for the last few centuries, the 'game' aspect changes real production and actual delivery of service. After the great depression, people weren't homeless and hungry because they *couldn't* have been provided shelter and food, it's because confidence evaporated and cash flow dried up. The 'game' of the last few years kept people fed and in houses (mostly) and kept production and service going more than it would have otherwise.

Economy is about motivating people to do for each other what must be done to be 'successful'. That involves a whole lot of arbitrary definitions of things and accommodating both rational and irrational responses.